CHAPTER TEN
APPARENTLY, ITTOOK a little while to get the results on a DNA test. And Olive was doing her best to pass the time until Gunnar confirmed what she suspected they both already knew.
After breakfast that morning she explored. Every room in the house was a particular sort of beige, not plain, just tranquil.
But then she opened the door at the back of the house, and was stunned by a riot of color. The shelves were lined with action figures, still in their boxes, stacks of board games and bins of... Candy.
“What?”
“What are you doing in here?”
She turned to face him, her heart pounding rapidly. “I was only... I just wanted to look around.”
“And now you have.”
“What is this?”
His face went hard. “It is nothing.”
“It’s not nothing. Look at all these toys...”
“It is a collection,” he said.
“Surely candy is not part of the collection.” She examined the rows of sweets. All brightly colored and very out of character.
But then, he’d eaten her cupcake.
Maybe it wasn’t out of character.
“In a manner of speaking it is.”
“You don’t eat the candy?” she pressed.
“I do,” he said.
And she might have laughed, at the discomfort she saw in him just now, except she could sense something vibrating beneath the surface, and it concerned her.
“Why?”
“It started as collecting some things I had when I was a child, and it expanded. Every billionaire must have a prescribed amount of novelty items that make no sense. I am quite a bit under the usual threshold.”
“That is fair. You don’t have an entire fleet of electric cars.”
“Only three.”
“Well, there you are. You are actually quite restrained.” She moved further into the room, her hands brushing up against one of the games. “Do you play these?”
“I’ve never had anyone to play with.”
She looked at him, and she felt...
It was such a tangle of emotions. Because he’d brought her here, and threatened her business, and turned her life upside down. And he was also...
Him. The him he’d always been. Who bewitched her and tangled her up, and made her want things she’d been certain she could never have.
Who vexed her and charmed her sometimes in equal measure. Though usually he was more vexing.
He was a cold, forbidding Viking warrior.